I can hear the groans now. Right now, some “social media ninja”, “search marketing guru” or “buzzword injecting marketer” (ok, the last one is made-up, but real all the same) is saying “…not ANOTHER interactive marketing company blog designed to create self-congratulatory content to be read by potential saps who don’t know any better – or worse yet aimed at faceless bots that report to a Borg-like index ruled by a finicky and ever devolving algorithm…”
Ok, maybe they didn’t say that. Maybe that was the sentiment I expressed when the staff at WrightIMC wanted to create a company blog.
The irony of this reaction was not lost on me. Frequently, we recommend that clients create their own blogs in order to keep their customers informed, demonstrate thought leadership, and of course, show up better in the major search engines. No one gets more irritated than me with the typical excuses like “we don’t have the time or resources for that” or “we just don’t have anything to say.”
In those situations, I don’t even have to formulate a response. It’s automatic: “You can succeed at SEO and Social Media Marketing without a blog – but it makes things a lot harder on everyone.”
So why do I not follow my own advice? Well, I have a blog. It’s at www.shavingoccam.com. I’m very proud of how clever I was the day I came up with that blog’s name. That blog has been around for four years. It’s got a great Google Pagerank and shows up under a lot of great keywords (and some really weird ones around shaving and fetishes). I’ve always thought that was enough, and at the beginning of WrightIMC (our third year anniversary is next month!), it was.
Don’t worry, the Shaving Occam blog isn’t going away. In fact, I’m hoping that I’ll be able to make it better. But I digress, as usual.
Let’s talk about this blog.
Recently, we hired a new staff member – one that I am very excited about. Shilpa Nicodemus, our resident brain surgeon (no really, she’s got degrees in neuroscience and other stuff I can’t pronounce) joined us a couple of months ago in order to help us bring our social media marketing to the next level.
As far as search is concerned, I’ll put WrightIMC up against anyone for natural or paid search results. We’ve won awards along the way, our clients are happy and we are good at it. Ok, don’t look at our own site. Our “client comes first” philosophy gets in the way of our self-branding success. But I’ve digressed yet again. What I was saying…Our social media strategy has always been strong – and now we have the resource muscle to match our strategy strength with stellar implementation. We now have MEASURABLE social media programs that blow away most of the other stuff out there. Yea, I’m proud and excited.
So we’ve started this blog as a way of practicing what we preach for our own marketing. I’ve asked Shilpa to act as editor, contributor, designer, and overall dictator. Sure, this blog is a team effort – but it’s Shilpa’s hand that will be molding the final product. The direction I’ve given is that I want this blog to be a reflection of the culture we are building at WrightIMC. It’s a fun culture – but one where we work hard. It’s not uncommon to hear a heated argument about an esoteric element of the Google algorithm immediately punctuated with an early ‘80s movie quote, or if John Confer is involved, a reference to some television shows like Jersey Shore geared at teen girls. And you really do wish you could be the proverbial “fly on the wall”.
Our goal with this blog is to let you be that buzzing fly. We want you to know what we’re thinking. We want you to know the triumphs, challenges, and just downright funny stuff that happens on a day-to-day basis in a super-fast paced, high energy, client-focused search marketing consultancy like ours.
So I invite you to share in our journey. Shilpa will be your cruise director. And I recommend knowing where the life vests are at all times. It’s not that we expect to throw anyone overboard – but I’m pretty sure someone’s going to wet along the way.
Oh, and since the theme for this week’s post was supposed to be “who I am and what I do at WrightIMC” – well, here you go.
My name is Tony Wright and I am a search marketingaholic. By day I am the CEO of WrightIMC and I love my job. By night I am a husband and father and I love that job too. As CEO of WrightIMC, I do pretty much everything that needs to be done even if I don’t want to do it. As a father, well the same thing – except at WrightIMC I’ve never had to change anyone’s diaper. And well, I hope that my role as CEO never crosses that far over into my other life roles. I love the people I work with –but you can only go so far…Until next time.
